People often refer to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) when they talk about Content Optimisation. This does not mean that to make your content search engine friendly, you don’t need to optimise it.
Let us take a tour through this blog to get to know how we can optimise our content to improve our website performance.
What Is Content Optimization?
Content optimisation is creating content whether it’s a website blog or audio or visual content, to create in such a way that it helps in reaching a large number of target audiences. It not only involves performing certain technical tasks, but a lot of time-tested methods are also required to reach your desired goals. Important editorial and marketing segments are required to go through as well.
Advantages of Content Optimization
Content optimisation is important because without it your content or website will not be found by your audiences. Search-based queries are not the only method people find content, yet they are a powerful way people can find your content, even if you don’t send it to them directly as you perform in social media and ads. Potential customers will find your content if you optimise it properly.
Reasons you need to optimise your content:
- To rank on SERPs
- In Earning links
- To educate audiences
- Top-of-the-funnel leads increase
- To make your lead generation increase.
- For driving social engagements
How does Content Optimization work?
Making changes to the structure, copy, and metadata of your content to make it search-engine friendly is how content optimisation works. For example, for making an article separate into different sections, you can make section titles bold throughout. Tagging them into different headers (H1, H2, H3, and so on) can help you in getting green signals in the search traffic.
There are more technical ways of making your contents look great.
How can you make your Content Optimized?
There are a lot of things to keep in mind when it comes to optimising your content. But firstly, you need to ask yourself some questions about:
- What would be the search intent for these keywords
- Whether you can improve the content already ranking on the terms.
- What type of content do you need to show to your audiences?
After you have given thought to these questions, you can have a look at the ways to optimise the content.
Optimizing Text
There are many things to keep in mind over here:
- Writing well-written content – Over here there are many things that you shouldn’t do rather than doing it your content must be unique and must be relevant to the content, but you need to avoid keyword stuffing. Keyword really helps in driving traffic to your content, but excessive keywords are harmful to your page.
- Opting for more content periodically – Just like you can expect that every day something new to happen, similarly the search engine loves new and fresh content. If you publish new content in a certain period, then you have a chance to rank well in the SERPs.
- Title Tag Optimisation – The title tag helps the search engine to locate your content through it. It is displayed in the clickable result in the SERPs. Its code is like this:<head><title>Title Example</title></head>
- But it’s not really necessary to match your title tag with your article or the web page.
- Optimised H1 Tag – THe heading of a webpage is indicated by an H1 tag and helps the search engine understand what type of content is on that page. Its code is like this:<h1><title><h1>. A good H1 tag should follow the following rules:
- To include your target keywords.
- Be different marginally different or a bit the same from the title page.
- To use only once per page.
- Optimised H2 Tag – The next level heading after the H1 tag is the H2 tag and it appears typically as the main section headers of the webpage article. Its code is like this: <h2>SUBTITLE</h2>.
- You need to keep in mind in the case of both H1 and H2 tags, that we should not overuse them. We need to make sure that every time it comes, they should provide valuable and relevant information to the audience.
- Optimised Meta Description – The short snippet appearing underneath the title tag in the SERPs is called the Meta Description. Its code is like this: <head> <meta name=”description” content=”Text that will appear in search results”></head>
- Its approximate character limitation is 150 to 160 characters. To compel people to click on your listings and visit your website, you should create your Meta description like an ad copy.
- Targeting keywords in the first Paragraph
- The URL can be Search Engine Friendly – THe URL of your webpage should be meaningful and straightforward so that it also provides the search engine with enough descriptive information. So this means too that you don’t need to create the URL as same as the title of your webpage and article.
Optimizing Images
An image cannot be in touch with an algorithm but we should not forget about the quote that says about an image that is worth more than a thousand words. An image also needs to be tagged properly so that be noticed by search engines.
- Alt Tages – Though many of them use this term, it is generally called Alt Text or Alt descriptions. It helps search engines to let them know about your appearance and function through your image(s). Its code is like this: <img src=”kittenonbed.gif” alt=”Sleepy Kitten”>We need to avoid keyword stuffing over here as well and the Alt Tags should describe the images both sufficiently and accurately.
- Image Tags – An image tag helps in indicating the words that appear when you float an image and help to understand its context to the users.
Optimizing Videos
Search Engines are not only for texted articles, theta re for videos as well. YouTube is the biggest video steeming platform but there are others as well like Vimeo and Dailymotion.
Just like the images, you also need to keep a few things in mind to make your video appear in the SERPs.
- Title of the Videos – Your video title matters because it tells the search engine whether it is relevant to a user’s search query or not. You need to insert your keyword naturally so that your video title gets seen in the search engine or maybe on the YouTube result pages.
- Description of your Video Content – The video descriptions are similar to the meta description of web content. They need to describe your video content accurately by including your search keywords naturally and impelling your audience to click. You should always remember to display it like an Ad copy
- On-site Optimization – If you host your videos yourself then it will serve the purpose of SEO. If you do so, it will allow you to get more video snippets for your domain, build backlinks to the content, and customising your video player.
- Overall, a rich video snippet is equivalent to the title tag or meta description that we discussed.
Here are some more points to keep in mind while optimising your video contents:-
- You can allow people to embed it.
- Accompanying text or photos will serve
- Place social sharing buttons
- Avoid embedding your content using iFrame. Use Flash, Javascript, or HTML5.
- Submit a sitemap for your video to Google and other search engines.
Content Optimisation in Social Media
Social media also helps in optimising your contents for search engines. You need to build interaction and social signals in social media.
Like in the previous segment we talked about optimising video contents, over here you can also publish your video contents on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter, by optimising in the similar way as mentioned previously. It will also help you get similar results the same way as YouTube.
When you want to let your audience know about your business product or service through your social media contents, you can also create the text in such a way it will give you a good amount of page visitors. To follow this process, you can also take some of the tips that we mentioned before in optimising your texted content.
Final Wrap Up
So we knew from before that content is a great value for your business website and other platforms. Which type of content to choose and how to optimise it is up to you but when you’re running a business, it is suggested that you opt for all types of contents and spread them on every platform because different people have different choices. Some like to read website blogs and some like to watch videos on youtube, Facebook, or Instagram.